WORK IN PROGRESS: Guy and Reason

Chapter 3 (Eden/Reason): Nothing

The first thing I did when I got home from the grocery store and my run-in with Guy was make sure that my chocolate-salted caramel-dark chocolate swirl ice cream wasn't defective. Sometimes you got bad batches, so it was always best to make sure the carton was good. It was fine, fortunately.

And as I performed spoonful after spoonful of quality assurance, I thought about what had happened. Who did Guy think he was anyway? Telling me to watch his interviews as if I owed him that. I'd been owed fidelity and I'd gotten infidelity, so he could take his you might learn something and shove it up his jockstrap along with some poison ivy.

I called my mother. "Guess who I ran into?"

"Guy," she said. "I've already had five calls about the grocery store incident. Ope! There's another one coming in now, but that's Teri, so I'll call her back."

I always wondered why the CIA and FBI and other acronym agencies didn't employ small towns to help with their information gathering. Nothing could happen in this town without at least three people calling your mother.

"Delinda said you were eyeing up the butternut squash and she was afraid there was going to be a murder."

"Well, I resisted," I grumbled. "But what gives him the right to approach me after three years?"

"Maybe it was the first chance he had to talk with you?"

"He said he was at my graduation."

"Maybe he was too ashamed to approach you then, Eden. That boy loved you, and then he did...that to you. He cheated. Up to that point, he'd always been like his daddy, all about honor and integrity and pride, and suddenly he wasn't. He'd done one of the lowest things you could do to the woman you loved."

"He told me to watch his interviews because I might learn something. Did you ever watch any?"

"No, honey. After he broke my daughter's heart, I never watched any football again, told my friends to never mention him and let them know I was serious about that. If I ever even heard his name, I left the conversation and walked away. They learned after a while."

"Well, if he really wanted to talk to me, he's had three years."

"He didn't know where you were."

"I'm assuming he became an NFL player if he's giving interviews, so he could have hired an investigator to find me."

"He could have. Or maybe he was respecting your desire to disappear after what he'd done. There are any number of reasons why he didn't attempt to force his way back into your life."

"If he was worried about respecting me, he never would have cheated! I just don't understand any of this. Why he's back, the timing, wanting to talk to me now. This is driving me crazy because it doesn't make any sense."

She hesitated. I heard her intake of breath as if she was about to speak, then a pause before she finally spoke. "Are you listening to yourself, Eden?"

"What do you mean, Mom?"

"You're all worked up, honey. You have questions that are bothering you and have been bothering you for three years. You never spoke to him after that phone call when you were on your way up to see him. You said it didn't matter why he'd cheated, but maybe you needed a final conversation. Not to listen to his reasons for what he did or his excuses or apologies but for you to tell him how what he did affected you."

"Mom, he broke up with me over the phone after eight years together. I was driving to him and he couldn't wait forty-five minutes to talk in person? And then, on top of that, he put me on speakerphone where that fucking bitch Ingrid was listening in and saying things. Do you really think he was all that concerned about me if he could do that? Like the time to talk would have been back then, not now when it's too late to make a difference."

"That's one way to look at it. But maybe it would let you finally put things to rest if you got everything off your chest. Really let him have it while you unloaded on him. I'm not saying you have to or you should, I'm just saying think about it. Maybe it's not about what he wants to say to you but about what you need to say to him."

"I have nothing to say to him."

"And that's up to you, honey. But I'm your mother, and I have a different viewpoint. You had all those emotions and no target for them because you never unleashed on him. I saw you go through a phase that wasn't exactly self-destructive, but it certainly wasn't healthy. It wasn't you."

"Maybe it was," I snapped. "Maybe it was my chance to move on from Guy. My way of coping with the pain of what he'd done."

"But did it help? Did you cope? Did it actually help move you forward? Or was it just a distraction from the pain? I'm all for new experiences if they're for the right reasons, but if they're simply to put a bandage on a wound, you're just covering up the hurt and the pain. Eventually, they'll fester into bitterness and keep you stuck in the past."

"I'm not stuck in the past." I wasn't. I'd moved on.

Mom didn't say anything to that, but she didn't have to. It was her I-disagree-but-there's-no-use-arguing-with-you silence. But in this case, she was wrong. I wasn't stuck anywhere. I had a great job, got to live in new places, meet new people, experience new things. I dated casually but attempting anything serious would be pointless until I stopped moving every three or four months for a new assignment.

When Guy had broken up with me, I'd gone through so many emotions, so much pain. At first, I'd been shocked and had trouble wrapping my mind around what had happened. What he'd done. There'd been a huge void in my life that ached for him, and I remember walking around in a daze, going from place to place to escape my new reality of a life without him. I moved about frantically, trying to catch my breath, trying to remember how to breathe, trying to find something to anchor me in place so I didn't just float away on the pain that was threatening to unravel me from the inside out. When someone you love is suddenly gone from your life, the love you had for them doesn't simply disappear, it just no longer has an outlet, a way to express itself.

Those first days, I kept thinking, What do I do with it? What do I do with all of this love that I can no longer give to him? It forced its way up from a deep part of me and spilled out in tears and rage and long, keening cries leaving me feeling as if I were more animal than human since pain has no words, only sounds; it is a person at her most elemental and basic. I felt as if there was a physical being inside of me trying to force its way out, filling me with pressure and heaviness and absolute chaos. I wanted to escape from it, but I couldn't, and I couldn't because it was within me so wherever I went, it accompanied me like an unwanted guest who wouldn't leave.

For a year, I tried to avoid the pain. But after that period of time, when it clearly hadn't worked, I began working through my grief and, as my grandmother had once told me after my grandfather died, it was never going to be easy, but it would get easier. She was right. There was a day when I could breathe without that feeling of a weight being on my chest, and then another day and another, until the weightless days were more common. I progressed steadily from there, and Guy was relegated to my past.

Until today, when my past was in my face, and I felt like all of that progress was forgotten in a moment when Guy confronted me in the grocery store, of all places. Saying shit. Demanding things.

Because he'd decided to show up three years too late, he didn't get any more of my time. I owed him nothing, and that's exactly what he'd get from me.

Nothing.